ISTANBUL TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING FOR CORPORATE FIRMS: AVEA

EXECUTIVE MASTER of BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

PROGRAMME

GRADUATION PROJECT

CEM ŞENKAL

ADVISOR: Assoc. Prof. Dr. A. Banu Elmadağ Baş

JUNE 2014

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PREFACE

First I want to thank my academic advisor Assoc. Prof. Dr. A. Banu Elmadag Bas, Avea

employees and Avea customers for their support.

I hope the paper that I’ve written may be useful for researchers, social media

marketers and employees.

Cem Senkal, June 2014

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1 TABLE OF CONTENTS

2 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................... 5

3 SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING AND SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING MANAGEMENT ... 6

3.1 EVOLUTION OF SOCIAL MEDIA .................................................................. 6

3.2 TRENDS OF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING .................................................. 10

3.2.1 CONSUMER TRENDS ......................................................................... 10

3.2.2 CORPORATE TRENDS......................................................................... 12

3.3 SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING MANAGEMENT & STRATEGY ........................ 14

4 UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN MARKETING ACTIVITIES AND

HOW AVEA USE SOCIAL MEDIA IN MARKETING ............................................... 19

4.1 OBJECTIVE .............................................................................................. 21

4.2 METHODS ............................................................................................... 22

4.3 FINDINGS................................................................................................ 22

4.3.1 Avea ................................................................................................. 22

4.3.2 Turkcell ............................................................................................ 28

4.3.3 Vodafone .......................................................................................... 29

5 CONCULUTION .............................................................................................. 30

6 REFERENCES .................................................................................................. 32

7 APPENDIX ..................................................................................................... 34

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Abstract

After entrance of Internet to our lives and became popular usage of internet not

only individuals but also companies are affected. Becoming popular of internet

usage society has become more internet based. Internet is been used for shopping,

education, entertainment, banking and social networking. In the beginning of 2000’s

Sharing, exchanging information and creating ideas became easier. After world

internet access availability become easier and changing internet connection from

dial-up to DSL means faster internet connections and this change brought mobility

use of internet. So, by the development of internet technology increase the usage of

internet.

With increase usage of internet and becoming popular of internet usage; people are

now going on-line every day to checking bank statements to shopping for groceries.

Popularity and traffic of forums, social blogs, micro-blogs and social networks were

the key factors those engaged the attention of marketers. Meanwhile digital

technologies penetrated into lives. Social media marketing became the rising star in

digital marketing branches.

The objective of this project is to investigate the importance and usage of social

media for corporate firms: Avea. I will try to explain abstract of social media

marketing; where is it now, where it’s heading in future, how corporate companies

benefit from social media.

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2 INTRODUCTION

More people are using internet so social media. While this, companies are looking

for way of researching customers with same messages those they have been using in

other channels. With the massive increase of social media usage marketing

executives have started to pay more attention to social media marketing.

Social media platforms have embracing companies with in a neutral manner.

Companies those have not adapted the marketing strategies to social media

marketing they tend to fail, but companies with fitted marketing strategy will

increase their brand awareness, customer satisfaction, sales, decreased

advertisement costs and gain another channels where they can touch customers.

Social media is crucial right now, with the largest user demographic within the 18-24

age brackets. We can see that 86% of young in Europe are engaged in social media.

When we look at the USA, 78% of young use at least one of the social media

effectively (http://arbitron.mediar-oom.com/index.php?s=43&item=682). For

Turkey, the condition is brilliant. A new report by sosyalaglar.com gives marketers

and researchers a brilliant picture of the motivations and attitudes of social media

users in Turkey. While 79% of the Internet users (ages 15 to 35) participate in social

media – 44% on a weekly basis – less than 8% of social media users turn to these

sites for guidance on counseling decisions in any of product/service categories.

Moreover, 12% of social media users state that they buy from companies that

advertise on those social sites. When we look at the Twitter that is micro-site as an

impressive number, Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users all around the

world. 300,000 new users sign up per day and approximately 60% of them are

coming from outside the U.S. Another and the biggest social media tool in history,

Facebook, has 300 million active users, of which half access their accounts daily.

(*Assist. Prof.

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In this study; I will try to explain the evolution of social media, trends of social media

marketing in consumer and corporate manner and marketing management. Then I

will try to point how Avea use the social media marketing and how effective is social

media marketing for corporate companies such as Avea and Avea’s opponents.

3 SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING AND SOCIAL MEDIA

MARKETING MANAGEMENT

Social media is a new and a whole different channel that you can touch your target

customer with different strategies and key item is to understand the risky nature of

social media in the market perspective. Because wrong message may harm your

company more than other channels / this is why social media marketing

management is also very important. On the other hand understanding the social

media world and making it a piece of your corporate is the core of social media

marketing management. One of the keys of success is to analyze the customer target

carefully and create the campaigns and strategy according to the target customer.

3.1 EVOLUTION OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Every human being born in a society and grow in a network so there is nothing more

natural to gather and share information. Social media is one way of networking and

connecting people by holding through technology. And of course one of the fastest

way to communicate people. Social media means for consumers to share text,

images, audios, videos and ideas with each other.

Social media has become the indispensable part of society and it has altered so

many times. Very first social network has created over 100.00 years ago. A caveman

threw a rock to another caveman; this caveman picked the rock and threw it to the

3rd caveman. This is the core of social networking.

More known shape of social network was created in 1968 and came online in late of

70’s. BBS exchanges data over phone lines; founder exchanged the first photo on

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BBS in 1978. That was just the beginning of social networking, in the early 90’s

companies such AOL and CompuServe created chat rooms and people started

sharing links, informations and data’s with each other in specific community chat

rooms. (*Seymour, 2011)

Beside all these evolvement, Friendster founded as the very first example of modern

social media in 2002 and there were 90.000.000-registered users mostly from Asia.

MySpace was one of the major social media of all time between 2003 and 2006.

MySpace had differentiated itself with allowing users to customize their profiles and

posting music in their profile. Meanwhile Facebook was being founded as a local

social network of Harvard in 2004, it rapidly expanded to other universities and high

schools then to everyone till 2006. Facebook had unique advantages rather than its

competitors such as; posting photo, videos and customizing profile contents, instant

messaging and one of the most important different special was applications.

Nowadays there are 3 main platforms for social media;

Online Communities and Forums

Blogs

Social Networks

Online Communities and Forums can be valuable resource for companies and can

provide multiple functions by both collecting data and conveying key information. A

key for success of online communities to create individual and group activities that

helps from bonds among community members. Blogs are frequently updated online

journals or diaries. They have become an important outlet for word of mouth.

Appeal of blog is bringing together people with common interests. Corporations are

creating their own blogs and carefully managing them. Social network consist variety

of different networks, which offer different benefits to firms. For example Twitter is

an early warning system that enable rapid responses, whereas Facebook allows

deeper dives to engage consumers in more meaningful ways. (*Keller, 2011)

On the other hand recently niche social media sites began cropping up for specific

target group and specific purposes. For instance photo sharing (instagram), video

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sharing (instagram, vine) social news sharing (twitter) real time updated micro blogs

(twitter), business content sharing (linked-in) and geo-social based location sharing

(foursquare).

Integrated marketing communications –IMC– is the guiding principle organizations

follow to communicate with their target markets. Integrated marketing

communications attempts to coordinate and control the various elements of the

promotional mix to produce a unified customer-focused message and therefore

achieve various organizational objectives. (*Mangold, 2009)

Tools and strategies for communicating with customers have changed with rise of

social media. They have become a major factor in influencing consumer behavior

including awareness, information acquisition, opinions, attitudes, purchase behavior

and pot purchase communication and evaluations.

We can summarize differences between traditional integrated marketing

communications and social media communications. Traditional IMC strategy focus

on vision and mission of the organization uses promotion mix tools to broadcast a

unified message. Information has generally confined to face-to-face, word-of-mouth

communications among consumers and they have minimal affects to dynamics of

market. On the other hand, social media enables companies to talk their customers.

Also they enable customers to talk each other and companies. Consumers now have

the ability to tell thousands of other people with a few keystrokes. Lastly marketers

drop away their control over the content, timing and frequency of information.

In worldwide; companies use Facebook to capture customers. By doing this they use

several methods. Here are five ways they're connecting with customers on

Facebook.

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These are:

Promotions: For retailers, the key is to treat "fans" differently than other customers

by providing special access to offers and information. Using Facebook as a one-way

communications channel is a baby step. Smarter approach is to reward fans by, for

instance, providing Facebook-only discounts and sneak peeks at upcoming products.

Participatory promotions are particularly effective as they add excitement to online

purchasing and an incentive for customers to invite other friends. For example,

Lowes ran a Black Friday campaign on Facebook in which it offered a limited number

of items at ridiculously low prices for fans only. Most discounts were in the range of

90% and were limited to the first 100 people to check out with the item at

lowes.com. Not only did this engage existing customers, but it drove new customers

to "like" Lowes' Facebook page, allowing Lowes to post future deals-on their

newsfeeds.

Crowd sourcing: The Wal-Mart Crowd Savers program, for example, offers a

potential deal to Facebook fans that is only activated if enough fans "like" the

promotion - in effect, joining together to reach a goal - much like Groupon's model.

Similarly, last year Gap asked its Facebook fans to comment on its new logo design.

After a barrage of negative feedback from fans, Gap invited them to submit their

own designs. Responding to customers' outcry, the retailer ultimately restored its

original logo.

Check-ins: Mobile-device check-ins is a popular way to electronically announce the

arrival at a location. Facebook Deals enables retailers to provide electronic coupons

and loyalty points when customers check in at arrival, increasing store traffic and

sales, and giving retailers a clearer picture of their customers' behavior. Last year REI

drove traffic to its stores by offering $1 donations to charity for every check-in, with

a ceiling of $100,000. American Eagle has offered 20% discounts to customers who

check into its stores.

Games: Games like Farmville and Mafia Wars hosted on Facebook are immensely

successful, creating an ideal opportunity for retailers to do something they know

well: marry entertainment and merchandising. Last summer 7-Eleven partnered with

game-maker Zynga to extend social games into the physical world. Items such as

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slurpees and Big Gilps were branded with Farmville, Mafia Wars and YoVille designs

that had redemption codes for in-game rewards.

Social Shopping: The most obvious use of Facebook is to create more than just an e-

commerce store within a Facebook frame. This is a step in the right direction, but to

take real advantage of Facebook, retailers must make it easier for people on the site

to communicate with each other about products, promotions' and reviews, and

seamlessly make purchases. Facebook is testing a Buy-with-Friends program'

currently limited to virtual goods, that publishes users' purchases on friends'

newsfeeds and, by offering discounts, encourages those friends to make the same

purchase. All companies, not just retailers, should be using social media like

Facebook to listen to what customers are saying about their products and brand.

(*Dr. M. Saravanakumar, Dr. T. SuganthaLakshmi, 2012)

3.2 TRENDS OF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

We can separate the trends in 2 categories. These are corporate trends and

consumer trends.

3.2.1 CONSUMER TRENDS

Population growth, young population, smart phone and tablet usage are the key

indicators for projecting the consumer trends.

Turkey is the 3rd population in Europe after Russia and Germany. Also Turkey has the

highest birth and fertility rate that provide them to be the youngest population in

Europe. At the early of 2020’s Turkey is expected to be the most populated nation in

Europe with 8,3% expand rate.

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Youth and large population increase the interest in to businesses, so smart phones

and tablets are the some of the products which are affected. In these days wearable

technological devices seems to be affected in near future. People mostly prefer

expensive and full functional phones in Turkey. There are 68 million mobile phones

in Turkey. 42 million are connect via 3G and 10 million of it are smart phones. On the

other hand 90% of the smartphone users are connected to internet which is the

highest rank in developing countries. 75% of the smart phone users are active social

media members, which are the one of the most important info, which projects the

trend very well. When we look global perspective household have 78% mobile

phone, it was 20% in 2000. In 2016 78% of the mobile phones are expected to

smartphones.

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3.2.2 CORPORATE TRENDS

Marketers very well know that there are 3 major digital marketing activities to be

successful. Corporate website, digital advertising and social media marketing.

According to more than 40% of marketers corporate website and digital advertising

are equally crucial. Then social media marketing comes up as the next important

activity.

If we investigate core duties of people who are dealing with social media marketing

we mostly see creating content that speak with unique voice. Companies must

answer some questions with their value proposition by translating into an

information full and issue centric manner.

Messages must contain the exact problem that we solve and customers must know

for whom we solved the problem. On the other hand message must show how the

problem affect target customer group’s life. Also marketers have to mention the

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expanded implication of the problem in a society perspective. Last important thing is

saying the special offer to the scope of the problem and why it is special or unique.

It seems in 2014 we will face more niche social networks, which locates themselves

as a solution of specific demands and needs. One of the most important of e-

commerce is social commerce and it will rise not only in Facebook but also Amazon,

Tumblr and Fancy continue to enable sharing interests among people’s social circle.

Nevertheless most of social media platforms will not have such vivid increase in

Chine, because of great firewall of China. On the other hand it will create an

advantage to Baidu, Wealink and Tianji instead of LinkedIn, Twitter and Google in

China. (* Lima Consulting Company, 2013)

Also big brands use social media for marketing activities. Social media is being widely

used by almost all and even the companies, in spite of their size have started using

social media to advertise and promote themselves. Big brands like IBM, Dell and

Burger King have made use of the social media to a greater extent. IBM owns more

than 100 different blogs, a dozen islands in the virtual world, several official Twitter

accounts, and a accepted forum called DeveloperWorks. It publishes a machine

series on youTube, and several employees upload presentations to the media-

sharing-site SlideShare.

Dell has tapped the power of social media with its hugely popular IdeaStorm

website, where users add thoughts for new creation lines and enhancement, choose

them up or down, and comment on submission. Because of the site, Dell has ongoing

to ship computers with Linux install, and has added community carry. Starbucks has

also started to use this representation to some success with its MyStarbucks Idea

Site. Burger King has made headline time and time again with its innovative and viral

social marketing campaigns. The burger chain offered Facebook users a free

Whopper coupon if they would "unfriend" 10 of their social network connections.

(*Dr. M. Saravanakumar, Dr.T.SuganthaLakshmi, 2012)

Another big trend is Big Data; I think most of us heard of it. However as a start of

2013 it will be about personalization of data for 3 years. Marketer will determine

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how consumers understand the brand, their content and products. So promotions

will be addressed to target customer groups more successfully than ever. Companies

are able to decide the keywords that need to be tracked in social media.

Some researches show that top invested areas in digital marketing will be social

media marketing, content creation and mobile marketing. Global advertising

expenditures on social network web sites increased %155 to over $1.2 billion in

2007, with predictions that it will exceed 2.1 million by end of 2008. (*Belch&Belch –

Advertising Promotion) The budget consist of personal expenses, it solutions,

agencies who can handle website design, content creation, mobile marketing and

social media marketing.

3.3 SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING MANAGEMENT & STRATEGY

Company’s use social media marketing not because of social media is popular. There

are always several expectations and social media marketing strategies are built on

these objectives. We may divide them into 4 major strategic objectives.

Social media must be unified with the marketing strategy. There are 5 steps to align

the objective social media strategy.

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LISTENING

Companies must listen and analyze conversations that contain specific keywords or

their brands names. Keywords are king of parts of sentences or title of content that

consumers were shared. Right keywords should be chosen for listening. In this case

knowing your target audience is critical. What would I search for if I were a customer

is a good question to understand your customers? Combining those words is the

next step. Understanding people’s minds is important so getting a group of people

and brainstorming might be creative idea. Sentimental and semantic analyses

methods could be used in this manner.

There are 2 types of keywords. One is, Short-tail; one- or two-word phrases that are

typically very general in nature and attract a large volume of individual search

requests and the other one is, Long-tail, complex queries that contain more words

and are much more specific in nature and attract a much lower volume of search

traffic than short-tail keywords.

Stages may seem as a reflection of interactions on several platforms. Table placed

below is very useful to see the stages by interactions.

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OBJECTIVE

As I mentioned above there are several objectives to be aimed. It is crucial to focus

on bunch of objective instead of spending meaningless effort. Dealing with more

than one objective may distract the focus, so single objective is preferable.

POLICY

Each company needs a social media policy that reflects company value and principle.

Policy must contain organization strategy for social media, policy responsible,

definition of the responsible role, monitoring responsible and their managers’

trainings.

EXECUTION

A content schedule is the milestone of implementation. It contains theme, creator,

place and time to share, frequency and the media type (text, video, e-book etc.)

Corporate website – social media integration with buttons can be a good start.

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Contents or promotions, which give awards to attendees.

Adding social media channel in every place where the logo is shown.

Establish a dialogue with influencers, buyers and reviewers in a way they view as

responsive, sensitive, personalized and well targeted. To do so, coordinate all three

types of activities: Outbound, inbound and participatory.

MONITORING AND OPTIMIZATION

After implementation of social media marketing plan last step is evaluation.

Scheduled evaluation sessions are very important. Session must be followed as short

and long term meetings.

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Measuring social media indicators for understanding the performance of activities.

There are several key point indicators for companies to evaluate their social media

marketing plan.

Fan Growth: It is crucial to determine the effectiveness of the messages, which you

send via social media in a selected time range.

Engagement: Count of virtual interaction such as mentions, likes, comments and

shares. It is important to see the ratio of the consumer who influence with the

content.

Response Rate: Direct interaction between consumer and the social media admin or

customer representative

User Activity: Time or duration when customers spend time in your page. It is

important to decide when to post the message.

Share-ability: Daily amount of sharing a page

Paid Advertisement Engagement: Amount of interaction through an advertisement,

which occurs, on consumers’ newsfeed.

Paid Advertisement Reach: Amount of the advertisement appeared in users’ page or

daily topics.

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4 UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN

MARKETING ACTIVITIES AND HOW AVEA USE SOCIAL

MEDIA IN MARKETING

According to Social Bakers May 2014 report Volkswagen has 3 million fans in

Facebook and the amount makes them the most popular corporate social media

account in Turkey. Avea is in the top 5 Facebook brands with 3rd. (*Social Bakers,

2014)

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Below table shows us the most active Twitter users in Turkey. As we see Avea is in

top ten list with 7th. (*Social Bakers, 2014)

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Below table shows us the all Facebook Pages that are currently monitoring in Turkey.

As we see Avea is the 3rd company in Turkey who has the 3rd highest local fans.

(*Social Bakers, 2014)

According to these reports and ratings, Avea is well known company in social media

in Turkey.

4.1 OBJECTIVE

The objective of this project is to identify the importance of social media in

marketing activities. On the other hand what kind of social media marketing

activities corporate firms should follow and what does Avea do for social marketing,

how Avea does the social marketing activities and where is Avea on social media

channels. That is why I made this research.

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4.2 METHODS

Primary data collected by conducting in-department interviews with managers,

employees and customers of Avea. Secondary data’s collected from the social media

analytics platform which provides a leading global solution that allows brands to

measure, compare, and contrast the success of their social media campaigns with

competitive intelligence Social Bakers.

4.3 FINDINGS

In my project I collected primary data by interviewing with Zuhal Şeker, Gökçe

Erkaya, Baris Ulu, Ceren Kardeş, Deniz Türkkol and Sinan Horasan. I also used several

articles, and analyses form the websites as a secondary data.

4.3.1 AVEA

Avea, the sole GSM 1800 mobile operator of Turkey, was founded in 2004. Avea, the

youngest operator of Turkey, has a nationwide customer base of nearly 14,5 million

at the end of the year of 2013. Offering services to 98% of Turkey's population

through its next generation network, the company is growing fast both in the

corporate and individual services with the brand "Avea" and constantly investing in

technology and infrastructure as well as in its management and around 3000

employees. Having roaming agreements with 667 operators in 205 countries, the

company continues to expand its roaming partnerships.

Avea is 3rd popular corporate Facebook account with 2.25 million fans in overall

Turkish companies. Moreover Avea has 266,494 followers in Twitter and 41,114

followers in LinkedIn and 34,717 followers on Foursquare.

As Mrs. Feridun who is Corporate Communications Director in Avea said in an

interview made for webrazzi; she told, “Social Media metering is a light house for

communication strategies.”

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Also she told that they get support from an agency for social media scan and for

metering. The agency follows 7/24 the entire social networks, blogs and web sites

the talks about Avea and they share the informations with us. We use different kind

reporting. We have a warning system to take action for developments in instant

scratch. This system helps us to be careful about instant developments and creates

the fundamental of data’s we analyses.

The biggest advantage is “Social Media activities can be measured.” She explained

this as; “Your target audience, your customers share their ideas with you, the can

comment, make suggestions about your products and services and they can ask

whatever they want from you. All these shares, on behalf of our customers to have

insight about: an incredibly valuable source of informations. Also at the same time

for communication strategies these informations serves as an beacon on our way.”

(*Webrazzi, 2013)

4.3.1.1 Interview with Social Media Customer Service:

I made an interview with Zuhal Şeker who works as a Customer Service Back

Office Social Media Operations Complaints Management Department Unit

Manager of Avea. When she hear the word of Social Media; Facebook, Twitter,

Instagram and Friendfeed comes in her mind. About the effectiveness of social

media; she said “Nowadays, internet use is extremely widespread; especially the

rapid growth in mobile internet usage trends parallel to the interaction of social

media channels is growing at an incredible pace. According to the studies, people

wake up early in the morning tend to control social media accounts. Social Media

has become an indispensable part of our lives; the use of social media, it makes

an extremely effective channel.” She continued; “The biggest drawback of social

media is information pollution. The best example of this, in some cases recently

where we live in community with examples of hoaxes we have seen spreading in

social media. However, we do not consider some interventions, social media is

much freer than conventional media on a lot cheaper, followed up by a new

generation that is much closer and with an independent image social media

became much more believable. From the perspective of companies with very low

cost of operations can be performed very serious marketing and advertising has

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reached a medium position.” About the future of marketing activities she

explains the role of social media as “In parallel to the widespread use of social

media companies also started to give much importance to this field. Companies

are using social media actively at very low cost of advertising and perform

serious marketing activities and by this way they increase awareness of brands

and products. Customer leads are being created, archived customer data to

different audiences through social media campaigns and products to go with

different content, such methods offer the right offers to the right customers

began to be monitored. Social Media Marketing activities started to be

preferential choose of marketing channels. Company-specific campaigns, social

media brings these channels become more active. Marketing activities of firms

priority in the near future through this channel seems inevitable execution.” As

social media channels, they use often Facebook and Twitter for the company.

Currently in the world and in Turkey the most intense interaction are in these

channels. Including interaction and hence to benefit from this potential, they use

these channels. About the complaints as she said; In general they receive

complaints from Social Media Channel in parallel with the received complaints

from other channels. She told “I am not a marketer but our target audience

should be all customers using social media and marketing activities with the

potential to use all customers who hear about our social media activities.

However, different marketing activities are carried out for different segments.”

About the strategy; as immediately following the pulse of technology and

innovation has gained the ability to adapt as a company since 2010 we are taking

place on Facebook. From that day until today the most current and strategic

social media channels running our campaign, aimed at creating a content

strategy interacting with our followers are watching. In 2011, we organized

"Konuşturan Sayfa" campaign. This campaigns return by number of fans

increased 10 times and make us Turkey’s leadership as the brand with the

highest number of fans. Beside Twitter, Facebook and Google+'s ; we have pages

on Youtube, Instagram, Foursquare and Vine which are niche channels we

speculate Avea Social Media Strategy media's spirit and tonality in accordance.

Every month we update our set a rule and content available on our roadmap.

This is following the agenda, the media is discovering the new features and we

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use the most efficient. In Turkey, Avea is the most active use of social media as

GSM operator. We are the first company who has started to offer customer

service with this channel. Some of our campaigns in social media became an

example to other companies and then we saw other companies make similar

campaigns. In this sense, we can call ourselves the pioneers of the sector in our

country. For our customers every question and trouble; we serve through Social

Media Channel not from directing our customers to another channel. Since the

customers' have interaction and tend to receive services through these channels,

we have been investing to this channel as a customer service. To give better

service via social media, we have serious funding’s for migrating the new system

which has supported with CRM infrastructure.

4.3.1.2 Interview with Avea Customer:

The interview below is made with Barış Ulu who is sales manager in BASF. Mr. Ulu is

one of the social media users and he uses social media actively. He uses Facebook,

Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare but he thinks Avea is not very frequently active user

of social media. In parallel this he does not follow or subscribe Avea’s social media

channels. In general, he thinks they are effective at least in terms of following new

campaigns. Instead of general campaigns; he thinks there must be some user-

specific campaigns based on attitudes of the user. To increase the effectiveness of

social media he thinks; For example some campaigns can be advertised by the

Twitter phenomenons. By this he thinks I guess he can touch the target audience,

which he thinks the young people. Attracting young people with especially cheaper

internet packages can be the purpose of the social media ads. About Avea’s

effectiveness for Mr. Ulu does not think Avea is using social media effectively; maybe

some small presents as a result of liking fan page of Avea on Facebook or the same

when you follow/retweet Avea on Twitter. Despite of this he thinks Turkcell is more

active than Avea on social media.

My other interview is with Ceren Kardes who works at BASF as Sales and Marketing

Support. She told me that he actively use social media. She use Linked-in, Facebook,

tweeter and foursquare. But also she thinks Avea is not quite active in social media.

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She thinks Avea should catch some people with some advertisements or promotions.

She does not actually follow or subscribe Avea’s social channels. She thinks Avea

needs to create some campaigns to take more attention like more promotions or

increasing the awareness of strengths. By doing this some social responsibility adds

or new solutions would be more interesting. The purpose of social media

commercials for Avea should be to catch the target market as she thinks. As target

she thinks University students or mobile internet users. Avea’s social media

effectiveness can be increased as she says “There is always room to increase”. But

eventually she remembers Turkcell more than Avea from the social media.

Another interview made with Gokce Erkaya who works as Associate Director in Jones

Lang LaSalle. He also uses social media. He uses just Facebook and Twitter. As he

told he does not see many ads of AVEA in social media. I think one of the problem of

Avea social media marketing is they could not increase the awareness of the Avea in

social media. As Mr. Erkaya said commercials are always effective but personally

they have a negative effect on him. He do not like seeing ads in social media. In

parallel he does not follow or subscribe to Avea’s social media channels. He thinks

Avea should make cheaper campaigns and faster Internet connection. As he said ”I

have 4GB package yet my Internet connection is not as fast as I was promised in the

ads”. This is another problem of Avea for him. To increase the effectiveness of social

media he thinks AVEA should consider the most popular social sites such as

Facebook and Twitter. And also he thinks Avea should reach out more and more

people especially youngsters. So Avea’s target customer should be 12-30 year olds.

Young and social media users. He does not follow or subscribe Avea so he does not

have any information regarding the effectiveness of AVEA in social media. Lastly he

sees mostly Turkcell in the social media. He says “They almost pop up everywhere

(not that this a desirable thing for an Internet user.”

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4.3.1.3 Interview with Avea Employee:

I made an interview with Sinan Horasan who works for Avea Customer Service as a

Project manager. As he told me he use social media very often. He mostly uses

Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Vine. And of course he follows Avea on the social

media channels. He sees Avea uses social media actively, so this means in the eyes of

employees Avea doing good job on social media. But he still thinks Avea can make

some improvements. Avea applications (Apple, Android) can be developed to use in

social media and new campaigns can be published that addressed Turkish Youth. As

saying Turkish youth Sinan thinks that the target audience of Ave should be Youth

between 15-30 years old. And as a Customer Service Project manager he thinks the

purpose of Avea’s social media marketing should take actions to reduce incoming

calls to customer service. I guess by this he means Avea should touch customers

from social media directly, get feedbacks and complaints directly from the customer

by using social media. And also he follows the rivals of Avea too. He thinks Turkcell

is very actively using social media too. Lastly he thinks about what avea doing good

is Applications are User-friendly, but “resolution time” of the problems that are

notified over Social Media can be improved.

I also made another interview with Deniz Turkkol who works in Avea as Business

Analyst since Jan 2012. His responsibilities are product management of CC

Infrastructure systems and related analysis. He also uses social media channels,

which are Instagram, Soundcloud, Vine, 8tracks, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and

Facebook actively. He is one of the follower and subscriber of Avea on social media

and Deniz thinks Avea use social media channels effectively. But he thinks Avea can

still increase the effectiveness of using social media by promotions especially, they

inform customers and potential about the campaigns and offers. Deniz thinks the

target customers should be Data based customers especially young target groups.

Deniz also follows Avea’s rivals in social media and he says they had started using

social media platforms after Avea, but Turkcell has impressive social activities.

Vodafone does not use social media as well as these 2 GSM Company. Lastly he

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thinks “Content management” is lack of Avea, but visuals and designs are good side

of Avea.

4.3.2 TURKCELL

GSM-based mobile communication in Turkey began when Turkcell commenced

operations in February 1994. Turkcell is a regional leader by being the market leader

in five countries out of nine it operates in. Turkcell's shares have been traded on the

Istanbul (IMKB) and New York Stock Exchanges (NYSE) since July 11, 2000, and it is

the first and only Turkish company ever to be listed on the NYSE. Turkcell also has

investments abroad. Turkcell conducts its mobile operations in growing markets like

Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Georgia through its subsidiary Fintur, in which

Turkcell holds a 41.45% stake. KKTCell, a 100% owned subsidiary of Turkcell, was

established in 1999 and operates within the framework of a revenue-sharing

agreement with the Telecommunications Authority of the Turkish Republic of

Northern Cyprus.

Turkcell has about 3,1 million fans in Facebook and the amount makes them the 2nd

most popular corporate social media account in Turkey.

On the other hand they have 492,896 followers in Twitter, 84,348 follower in

LinkedIn and 140,977 fans in Foursquare.

Turkcell has several successful social media marketing activities and some of them

get rewarded, such as ‘Turkcell’le daha fazla tweet’ campaign last year.

Campaign executed for a week and for 3 hours per day. Almost 57.000 tweets are

sent with #turkcelltweet hash tag and those numbers kept it in Trending Topic list for

8 days. Several singers and artists involved to campaign.

Turkcell gained impression of 3.6 million Twitter users and brand awareness is

increased. Besides Turkcell correctly identified that their target audience are very

active in social media, especially Twitter and they do that not just creating a new

twitter account, people were a part of the campaign.

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As Mr. Engin Gedik who is Turkcell Corporate Communication Digital Media Director

told, “It is not enough to work with an agency or by you. We have different tools to

measure our social media channels. We trust Socialbakers database for the ranking

as whole world does. In addition our social media channels follower counts, we also

measure our social media activities, the number of views of our interactive contents

and the masses that our messages reached.

We take very seriously the social media channels. For this reason, only about social

media monitoring and measurement processes to work with an agency or do it

ourselves this work does not come to us as the best choice. We measure and

monitor both in-house employees and agencies.“ (* Webrazzi, 2013)

4.3.3 VODAFONE

Vodafone Turkey was formed when Telsim, which was founded by the Uzan Group,

was included in Vodafone group in 2005 then Telsim brand name was changed into

Vodafone Turkey. Vodafone Turkey is the 2nd biggest mobile communication

company of Turkey with 20 million subscribers as 2014. Vodafone is the 2nd biggest

direct international investment of Turkey, the total investment of Vodafone Turkey,

including the acquisitions, since 2006 has exceeded TL 12 billion.

Vodafone has 1,636,334 fans in Facebook, 359,312 followers in Twitter. Beside their

competitors Vodafone has a special social media platform named “Vodafone Forum”

where tariffs, devices and services related topic are discussable. Company does not

prefer to use other niche social networks such as Pinterest, Instagram or Google+.

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5 CONCULUTION

As I already mentioned before, the objective of this project is to investigate the

importance and usage of social media for corporate firms: Avea. I try to project

overview about Social media marketing and Social media marketing Management

and Social Media Usage according to my researches.

Nowadays companies have massive budgets for marketing activities but most of

their effort can’t be measured, so most of marketer could not know their efforts

ended positively or negatively. In online marketing such as Social Media Marketing;

results are more measurable compared to many forms of marketing.

Internet penetrations, bandwidths and mobility have vividly increased recently and

consumers prefer to use internet in every moment of their lives without place

constraints. Social networks are the majors of the personal internet usage. Couple of

years ago we could not imagine that people would share their shopping items, follow

news instead of newspapers or portals, places that they visit, play games and even

foods they have eaten on social networks. These activities attract companies to add

social networks in their marketing plans.

Consequently there is a fact that telecommunication sector in Turkey is highly

competitive and each operator makes a tremendous effort to provide brand

awareness while simultaneously blocking potential negative brand sentiment. 3

operators have established their own accounts almost every social network platform

and competition remains in every aspect.

I can clearly indicate that none of the mobile operators have a planned content

strategy for their social media marketing activities, 3 companies show an

inconsistent posting policy. Sometime they can post 10 items per day, but next day

there may not be any activity. The inconsistency leads different ratios of people

talking about companies in social media despite the amount of followers or fans. For

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instance even Avea has less fans in Facebook, but they have 3 times people talking

rate in proportion to Turkcell. On the other hand operators miss some niche social

networks such as Instagram and corporate forums. Turkcell and Avea do not have a

corporate forum, but prefer to deal sponsorships with 3rd party forums, which have

big visitor amount. Beside Vodafone do not use Instagram at all.

As a consequence are seen form interviews for some customers Avea’s brand

awareness is low in social media. Avea must work on this issue. Avea and the

opponents of Avea do not have efficient content creation and duration plan for their

social media marketing activities in every social network. They need to work on the

“Social Media Marketing Strategy” carefully and professionally. Any company should

have a social media marketing strategy in terms of engaging with consumers and

creating the brand awareness and sales. Because social media channels will be the

new platform of the marketing and the era of the new marketing will be on social

networks.

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6 REFERENCES

E-Books

Dr. Tom Seymour, The History of Social Media and its Impact on Business,

Journal of Applied Management and Entrepreneurship Vol. 16, 2011

Kotler Keller,

Marketing Management, 2011

W. Glynn Mangold - David J. Faulds,

Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion mix, 2009

Electronics

Socialbakers, May 2014 Facebook Report:

http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/turkey

Doç. Dr. Gül BAYRAKTAROĞLU - Yard. Doç. Dr. Burcu İLTER

Social Marketing: Barriers and Suggestions

http://www.onlinedergi.com/MakaleDosyalari/51/PDF2007_1_7.pdf

Dr. M. Saravanakumar, Dr.T.SuganthaLakshmi

Social Media Marketing

http://dems.unimib.it/corsi/817/esercitazioni/social_media_mktg.pdf

Assist. Prof.

The Era of the New Marketing: Attitudes of Young Consumer towards Social Media

Marketing

http://newmedia.yeditepe.edu.tr/pdfs/isimd_10/ugur-bati.pdf

Socialbakers Twitter Brands Statistics

http://www.socialbakers.com/twitter/group/brands/country/turkey/

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Socialbakers Facebook Brands Statistics

http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/turkey

Webrazzi Sosyal Medya Olcumlemesi

Avea Kurumsal Iletisim Direktoru Fusun Feridun:

Turkcell Kurumsal İletişim Dijital Medya Müdürü Engin Gedik:

http://webrazzi.com/2011/07/12/sosyal-medya-olcumlemesi/

About Avea

http://www.avea.com.tr/web/Hakkimizda/SirketHakkinda/AveaHakkinda

About Vodafone

http://www.vodafone.com.tr/VodafoneHakkinda/tarihce_home.php?default_id=

hakkimizda-tarihce

About Turkcell

http://www.turkcell.com.tr/tr/hakkimizda/genel-bakis

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7 APPENDIX

7.1 INTERVIEW GUIDE

7.1.1 Questionnaire for Avea Corporate Communications:

1) Which social media channel first come to your mind, when you hear the

words social media?

2) How effective do you think is social media?

3) What are the advantages and disadvantages of social media by conventional

media?

4) What will be the role of Social Media for future of marketing?

5) Which social media channel do you use often, why?

6) Complaints received through social media channels are generally concerned

with what?

7) In this moment how effective do you use social media marketing? As budget

share, resource allocation, man-hour and investment amount how do you evaluate

according to conventional marketing channels to social media marketing?

8) In 1 or 2 years where do you see the social media marketing strategies in

Avea’s whole marketing strategy?

9) What is your purpose on doing social media marketing?

10) Is your social media marketing strategy about short-term goals, long-term

image management or sales-oriented?

11) Who are your target audience while doing social media marketing?

12) Who are the social media stakeholders for you and for the firm?

13) What is the strategy of Avea while doing social media marketing?

14) What is your view about opponents of the Avea’s in social media marketing?

15) What are the differences between Avea’s social media strategy and

competitors and differences of the social media usage? What are you trying to make

you different?

16) As we know social media usage is increasing day-by-day, as Avea do you plan

to make some additional investments about social media marketing in future?

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7.1.2 Questionnaires for Customers

1) Do you use social media?

2) How active is your operator in social media?

3) Which social media channels do you use actively?

4) Do you think that the commercials in social media are effective?

5) Do you follow or subscribe to Avea’s social accounts?

6) What kind of campaigns does Avea needs to do to take more attention do

you think?

7) To increase the effectiveness of social media what kind of advertising

campaigns would be effective for Avea?

8) What would be the purpose of social media commercials for Avea?

9) Who would be the target group of social media commercials for Avea?

10) As far as you follow Avea, do you think that Avea’s social media effectiveness

is enough and what kind of innovativeness should be done to increase the

effectiveness of social media?

11) What do you think about the effectiveness of the rivals of Avea?

7.1.3 Questionnaire for Avea Employees:

1) Do you use social media?

2) Which social media channels do you use actively?

3) Do you follow or subscribe to Avea’s social accounts?

4) Do you think Avea use social media effectively?

5) To increase the effectiveness of social media what kind of advertising

campaigns would Avea use?

6) Who would be the target group of social media commercials for Avea?

7) What would be the purpose of Avea’s social media marketing?

8) Do you follow or subscribe to Avea’s rivals in social media?

9) What do you think about the effectiveness of the rivals of Avea in social

media?

10) What are the better and worse social media marketing activities that Avea

does?

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INTERVIEWERS

Zuhal Şeker – Unit Manager / AVEA

Baris Ulu – Sales Manager / BASF

Ceren Kardes – Sales and Marketing Support / BASF

Gokce Erkaya – Associate Director / Jones Lang LaSalle

Sinan Horasan – Project Manager / AVEA

Deniz Turkkol – Business Analyst / AVEA